"It is not that you do wrong by design, but that you should never do right by mistake"
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The line stings because it strips away the refuge of good intentions. It suggests a pattern so perverse that even chance cannot produce virtue: if a right course presents itself accidentally, you find a way to miss it. The accusation is not of diabolical plotting but of a settled disposition, habits and incentives so entrenched that they steer you away from the public good unless it can be claimed as strategy. A person so arranged might not plan wrongs, yet still never allow a right to stand if it arrived unbidden.
Junius wrote amid the turbulence of late Georgian politics, when anonymous pamphleteering was a form of civic trial. His Letters of Junius (1769-1772), published in the Public Advertiser, attacked ministerial corruption and favoritism under the Duke of Grafton and others, excoriating abuses like general warrants and the persecution of John Wilkes. The style is epigrammatic and judicial, delivering verdicts in balanced antitheses. Wrong by design versus right by mistake is a neat blade: it spares the offender the charge of villainy while leaving a harsher judgment of character, one of inveterate partisanship and self-interest.
The line also speaks to the ethics of governance. Outcomes matter more than professions of motive. A government that never stumbles into justice reveals the architecture of its choices: patronage over merit, power over liberty, party over country. By refusing even accidental correctness, it shows that its compass is calibrated not by principle but by advantage. That is why the epigram still resonates. Institutions and leaders often protest benign aims while producing harmful effects; repeated outcomes disclose the real design.
There is a second edge: doing right ought not be the result of accident at all. Public duty requires a deliberate pursuit of justice. To rely on luck for virtue is already a failure. To be so constituted that luck never produces it is a damning one.
Junius wrote amid the turbulence of late Georgian politics, when anonymous pamphleteering was a form of civic trial. His Letters of Junius (1769-1772), published in the Public Advertiser, attacked ministerial corruption and favoritism under the Duke of Grafton and others, excoriating abuses like general warrants and the persecution of John Wilkes. The style is epigrammatic and judicial, delivering verdicts in balanced antitheses. Wrong by design versus right by mistake is a neat blade: it spares the offender the charge of villainy while leaving a harsher judgment of character, one of inveterate partisanship and self-interest.
The line also speaks to the ethics of governance. Outcomes matter more than professions of motive. A government that never stumbles into justice reveals the architecture of its choices: patronage over merit, power over liberty, party over country. By refusing even accidental correctness, it shows that its compass is calibrated not by principle but by advantage. That is why the epigram still resonates. Institutions and leaders often protest benign aims while producing harmful effects; repeated outcomes disclose the real design.
There is a second edge: doing right ought not be the result of accident at all. Public duty requires a deliberate pursuit of justice. To rely on luck for virtue is already a failure. To be so constituted that luck never produces it is a damning one.
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| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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